Cloud.com, formerly VMOps and the company offering a seamless way to deploy and manage hybrid cloud infrastructure for both enterprises and service providers, has announced support for VMware vSphere 4.1 and vCenter server today. During VMworld, they will be demoing their Cloud Stack platform on top of vSphere showcasing their interoperable open source cloud platform. The addition of support for VMware virtualization technologies to other hypervisors like KVM, Xen, etc. makes the Cloud.com offering a comprehensive platform on par with few other players in this segment.

As they released the version 2 of their product and morphed into Cloud.com from VMOps, they moved up the stack a little bit and positioned themselves as a strong player in the orchestration layer for cloud infrastructure. Their support for Openstack is also in tune with this repositioning and their plans to dominate the orchestration layer in the Openstack provider ecosystem.

Today morning, I spoke about Nimbula’s second round of funding and wondered how they are going to differentiate in an overcrowded market segment. There is some significant difference between Nimbula’s approach and Cloud.com’s approach. Nimbula installs on bare metal servers and they expect the enterprises to start with a clean slate using their technology. But Cloud.com installs on top of the existing enterprise infrastructure making them cloud ready. Even though I see a point in Nimbula’s approach to cloud computing, the approach taken by Cloud.com and few other providers in this space will prove to be more opportunistic because enterprises are not keen on throwing away their existing infrastructure in the name of moving to cloud.

This is exactly the reason why hybrid cloud market appears to be hot in the next few years. Enterprises want to take a slow and steady approach in their movement to cloud while still fully utilizing their existing infrastructure by making them more cloud like (a.k.a private clouds). By adopting a strategy where their enterprise customers can easily configure their existing infrastructure to be more “cloudy” while also moving certain workloads to public clouds, players like cloud.com greatly accelerate the enterprise adoption towards cloud computing.

Unlike the open core approach taken by the Cloud.com competitor Eucalyptus, Cloud.com is planning to support VMware technologies in all their editions (Community, Service Provider and Enterprise). Their monetization strategy is similar to the well known Redhat model. I had a chance to talk with Peder Ulander of Cloud.com and he is pretty excited about the support for VMware technologies because he says that there is a strong demand for Cloud.com to support VMware technologies even though an announcement is expected from VMware during the upcoming VMworld next week regarding their cloud offerings.

Krishnan Subramanian

Krish dons several avatars including entrepreneur in exile, analyst cum researcher, technology evangelist, blogger, ex-physicist, social/political commentator, etc.. My main focus is research and analysis on various high impact topics in the fields of Open Source, Cloud Computing and the interface between them. I also evangelize Open Source and Cloud Computing in various media outlets, blogs and other public forums. I offer strategic advise to both Cloud Computing and Open Source providers and, also, help other companies take advantage of Open Source and Cloud Computing. In my opinion, Open Source commoditized software and Cloud Computing commoditized computing resources. A combination of these two developments offers a strong competitive advantage to companies of all sizes and shapes. Due to various factors, including fear, the adoption of both Open Source and Cloud Computing are relatively slow in the business sector. So, I take it upon myself to clear any confusion in this regard and educate, enrich and advise users/customers to take advantage of the benefits offered by these technologies. I am also a managing partner in two consulting companies based in India. I blog about Open Source topics at http://open.krishworld.com and Cloud Computing related topics at http://www.cloudave.com.

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